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As Robert Fisk points out, we’re becoming addicted to Trump. Presidency by tweet and publicity stunts are diverting us from the real nastiness happening behind the scenes. But I want to take a step back.

Obama came to power promising change, but the type of change he promised wasn’t the type of change we thought he was promising. Trump came to power promising change, and he’s delivered: he’s debased politics in a way that no other has.

I predict that, in two years in the 2018 mid-terms, the Democrats will gain majorities in both houses. They will use that majority to impeach Trump. I think that would be a wasted opportunity, because Trump is a the symptom, not the cause, of the desire for change.

So, over the next couple of years, I’m going to stay clear of current affairs and look at how the system is broken and what could be done.

“[Trump] did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained the support of many to whom, though they detested [Trump], he yet seemed the only man strong enough to get things done.”

The big charge against Obama is that he came into power promising change and didn’t deliver. Let’s set aside the inconvenient fact that the American people voted Republican Congresses into power in 2011, 2013 and 2015, thus stymying any change. Obama may have promised change but it would seem that, on reflection, the American people didn’t want it. Or didn’t want the type of change he offered.

Anyway, Trump also came to power promising change, so let’s look at his first four weeks:

Hilary Clinton and Obama were decried for ties to Wall St in general and Goldman Sachs in particular. Trump’s new Treasury Secretary is none other than Mnuchin from… Goldman Sachs. No Change.

Hilary Clinton was called crooked because of the emails (despite the fact that repeated investigations by the FBI, even under blatantly partisan leadership, never found grounds to prosecute). Trump indulged in a very public selfie-fest when potentially secret information was being discussed over dinner in response to North Korea’s missile launch. No Change.

The number of people killed by drones peaked in 2010, and by 2016, was down to 3 strikes and 11 dead. One of Trump’s first actions: a military attack in Yemen, resulting in numerous deaths and casualties. Too early to call, but probably no change.

Obama promised to shut down Guantanamo. In a classic case of politics over principle, no senator or congressman wanted its inmates in his or her state or district, so it came to nothing. The number of inmates now stands at 41. Trump’s promised to fill it right back up again and has already found the first victim. No change.

Executive orders: the US government keeps a list of them here. Obama issued the lowest number of any recent president, and Trump came to power in a flurry of ExecuTweet Orders. Too early to call, but Trump thus far seems impatient of the legislative process. Change.

I could go on, but I won’t.

The quote above was from The Road to Serfdom, written by F.A. Hayek, the founder of neo-liberalism. The book does not, as is often represented, call for minimal government, but rather resists governments that plan. This is becuase central government planning, Hayek argues, leads to totalitarianism. I think he makes a strong case.

The first thing one does in a plan is to choose which bits are to be favoured. Trump has already picked which religions (Protestant Christianity, Orthodox Judism) and industries (coal, oil, steel and cars) are to receive his Imperial favour. And of course, there’s the wall, and rebuilding infrastructure. There’s a central government plan here, even if it hasn’t been articulated in public.

Hayek’s original? “[Trump]” in the quote above (p. 68) was “Hitler.” Welcome to the new America.

When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, one of the first orders of business of Tung Chee-Hwa, its first Chief Executive (the most senior administrative post in Hong Kong) was to establish the supremacy of Chinese Communist Party over the local judiciary. It’s interesting that one of Trump’s first acts is to attempt to establish the supremacy of the office of the President over America’s judiciary.

The background on Tung Chee-Hwa is this (skip forward if you know it): Hong Kong was a British colony from 1841 until 1997. As such, its judiciary was ultimately part of the British judiciary. Although the local courts could and did judge most cases, the final court was England’s Supreme Court, and the House of Lords and the Privy council before the Supreme Court was established.

It was uncontroversial that this wasn’t appropriate when the sovereign power was China, but it was also uncontroversial that Hong Kong would retain the system of common law. The solution was, therefore, that Hong Kong establish its own Court of Final Appeal (CFA), to be the final arbitrator. And, to be fair, most cases have been dealt with in that court.

But not all. It was an important point of principle with the communists that they had ultimate discretion. Tung (and them, no doubt) chose his battleground with care and patience. They waited until the right case came along, one in which the CFA produced a decision that was very unpopular – specifically, a Filipina that claimed she was denied the right to abode in Hong Kong under a discriminatory immigration law, and won. The government did some scare-mongering, and won a judgement in the CFA that the CFA invite the communists to “reinterpret” Hong Kong’s mini-constitution.

The resulting reinterpretation was predictable – the plaintiff lost – but the bigger point was that the CFA, although it retains that name, has in actuality since been the Court of Penultimate Appeal. The ultimate authority is political, not judicial. Hence Hong Kong’s judiciary is not independent.

Fast forward to Trump, and although the legal issue is coincidentally the same (immigration), the main political issue is who’s boss. The latest judgement makes it clear that the Trump administration is not arguing for the ban on legal or constitutional grounds, but claims rather than the executive order is “unreviewable” by the courts; and consequently that the constitution can be “switched on and off” at presidential behest.

The judgement, although interim, makes it clear that, in its current form, on legal grounds, the executive order doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell – rather than directing his “You’re fired” at Sally Yates, Trump should be directing his by-line at the person who drafted it.

But the nasty thought comes. Whatever you think of Trumps politics, his people are not stupid people. Could it be that the executive order was drafted in the full knowledge that it is unconstitutional, with the deliberate aim of getting a soon-to-be Republican majority Supreme Court to abrogate its own constitutional responsibility and make was for Imperator Trump?

Welcome to Imperium Trumpum, rule by Executive Orders (which are not even in the constitution) issued by America’s new Emperor on behalf of the Heritage Foundation.

This cannot fail, of course, to make America great. A president who is not welcome in the House of Parliament of America’s number one ally; an almost entirely male, Protestant and white cabinet (there’s exactly one black person, probably only there because he’s so useless he’s harmless) that includes Education, Energy and Environmental Secretaries whose stated aims are to trash the departments they’re to be put in charge of, a Secretary of State who holds a hero’s award from Russia and a Foreign Secretary whose policy appears to be to fight wars everywhere, with everyone, and preferably with nukes.

The budget – of course – will be cut, by US$10.5 trillion over ten years. Not bad, seeing the annual budget is about 3.6 trillion, so a 30% annual reduction. And he’s going to rebuild America’s infrastructure and fight a few wars, cut taxes (for the rich, at least), and still effect those huge cuts. Without increasing the deficit. 1+1+1=2? We seem to be not only fact-free, but logic-free.

Those politicians who question any appointments are silenced on frivolous grounds. The press are no longer welcome; the White House under Trump will be providing carefully orchestrated PR-sessions and any deviation will no doubt be labeled as “fake news.”

Before the election, many apologists for Trump said that he was playing to the gallery, and would moderate his policies once he was in power. To the contrary, to the extent that he said anything substantive at all, he’s setting out to do everything he said he would and much more.

There is a vision here, but what is it? As neither the Great Confusicator nor his party appear capable of articulating anything longer than a tweet, I think it’s worth a few posts to try and work out what that vision is. So watch this space.

The current meme amongst my pro-Brexit friends is that (a) Britain is a net importer of EU goods and services so the EU will meet Britain on Britain’s own terms and (b) the EU will disintegrate anyway.

I’ll save the first of these for a later post, as it’s related to Trump’s position on trade, and look here at the widely predicted disintegration of the EU.

The two main reasons used to support this are currency and migration.

Currency’s the easy one. In the short term, based on these IMF figures, the Euro zone’s GDP is about US$10tn, of which Greece accounts for US$0.2tn, or 2%. Irrespective of whether poor Greek peasants are enriching rapacious German banks, or German banks are carrying the cost of Greece’s inability to govern its own public finances, 2% is a manageable problem. As to those who claim that Italy and Spain are next to fall, leading to a disintegration of the Euro, I think that sovereign defaults by larger economies are more likely to trigger the structural reforms the Euro needs than to a disintegration of the EU.

Migration is a hot topic. But the issue to Europeans is not the internal migration that so irks Brexiteers – who have a sudden desire to unblock their own toilets and serve their own bar food – but external migration. With the exception of the Cold War era, border controls between continental European countries have ranged from lax to non-existent for most of its history: Schengen and the freedom of movement did little more than formalize that reality. But Britain had the Channel / La Manche – and there lies the problem. That stretch of water has kept Britain out of Europe in three very important, non-geographic ways.

Napoleon overran continental Europe. His empire was short-lived, but the Napoleonic Code lives on in nearly all of the other 26 members of the now EU. Britain is alone in using the Common Law. There are lots of learned articles on the differences between Code and Common Law, but my point is that Code Law gives the other European Countries a very different perspective of their public and political institutions to Britain: a commonality of expectations that transcends the linguistic barriers. Britain, with its very different history of law, has never quite got this point.

Etymology is the derivation of words, and the word of the moment is “bureaucracy.” This is of Franco-Greek derivation – bureau means desk and -cracy, rule by. Again, it’s the French. They invented bureaucracy, and their system of rule by technocrats behind desks was spread in Western Europe by… Napoleon. So while the British complain about rule by distant bureaucrats, it’s been the norm in Western Europe for the better part of of three centuries.

But bureaucracy per se is not the problem – any political unit bigger than a hamlet needs its bureaucrats. The key difference is not bureaucracy, but expectations: Europe’s bureaucracy has been centralized and large for a long time; Britain’s (at least in the popular imagination) diffused and small. That’s what irks – but it irks Britain a lot less than it irks Europeans. Again, the underlying perspectives are different.

Hitler, like Napoleon, overran continental Europe but, also like Napoleon, never landed troops on the British Isles. I’m not ignorant of the Blitz, the flattening of Coventry, and the sacrifices Britain made. But the damage to Britain’s cities, the internal displacement within Britain, and the violence committed to the social fabric, were a fraction of those suffered by Europe. The urge to make sure this is never repeated gives Europeans a much stronger political motive to “ever closer union” than Britain ever had.

So, to my Brexiteer friends who think that the EU will collapse without Britain, I say that, although the EU may collapse, it won’t be because Britain left it. If anything, Britain has been the main impediment to “ever closer union.” Weaving a fabric from carbon fibre and wool was just too damn hard. With the wool out of the loom, the warp will proceed apace.and, with Britain gone, I think that union will accelerate – and of necessity address the problems of the Euro and immigration in its wake.

All of which misses the real point: it’s not that Brexiteers think that EU will collapse, it’s that they want it to. In this respect, Britain was far more effective impeding ever closer union from within than it ever can be from without. In which respect Brexit, to use a fine British metaphor, is a splendid own goal.

I’d hoped to avoid writing about politics, but with Brexit and Trump in the ascendant, it’s impossible for me not to.

Last week, my more right-wing friends were delighted. Teresa May, in their view, gave a forthright and ballsy speech on Brexit at the annual gathering of the global plutocracy at Davos, and Trump articulated a bold vision the future of America in his inauguration speech.

Bollocks. May’s negotiating strategy is no more than a reflection of the simple reality that the EU, as the much larger, nastier and more experienced party to Britain’s exit negotiations, will set the terms of those negotiations, and the terms are and always have been that the EU is not going to abandon any of its core principles. Forget about the UK’s position; the position that matters is the EU’s. and that position is hard exit or no exit. The only surprise is that it took May so long to realize, or perhaps publically acknowledge, this harsh reality.

As to Trump, both his inauguration speech and the press conference last week were most notable not for what they contained, but for what they lacked: the how. Sure, he’s going to repeal and replace Obamacare – but with what? Sure, he’s going to attract companies to the rust-belt – but how? Subsidies? Tax breaks? Other than a few vague Trumpisms – “great guy, did a fantastic job / wonderful things” – neither his first press conference nor his inauguration answered these questions.

In short, other than the repeal of everything Obama ever did, there appears to be no legislative agenda. But building infrastructure, attracting businesses back to the rust belt, and excluding non-whites, non-Christians, non-males and non-Republicans from political life all require legislation. The executive branch of the government has very limited power – because the constitution is written that way – and there’s not a hint of what concrete steps President Trump has in mind to achieve that ambitious agenda.

Nor does Trump seem to be giving himself the foot soldiers he needs to create that legislative agenda. Of the 690 officials that the President appoints, Trump has managed a mere 28 where most presidents are up to a hundred by the time of their inauguration. Trump, on the day of his inauguration, sacked all ambassadors appointed by Obama, leaving him with no ambassadorial representation in 80 posts including the UK, Germany, Canada, China, India, Japan and Saudi Arabia.

The current most likely outcome is a shambles, both in domestic and foreign policy.

Thatcher and Reagan swept to power on the back of clear and clearly articulated visions of where they wanted to take their respective countries. May was never elected by popular vote, but was merely the least incompetent choice in a party leadership election of unsurpassed ugliness. Her vision was not even her own – as she opposed Brexit – but was forced upon her. Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million, and, although making America great is a catchy phrase, “great” entails competence, and there’s little sign of that as things stand.

The comparison of May and Trump with the Iron Lady and the Great Communicator holds no water. Barring a convenient and popular war, May will get the EU’s hard exit and Trump’s administration will collapse under its own incompetence and hubris. The danger is that the Tin Lady and the Great Confusicator become so embattled that, to survive, they create that war.

Hong Kong Future Perfect, a collection of twenty stories about the Hong Kong of the future, was launched last night. I’m still reading the others, but here’s how my contribution starts…

—

Twenty Three

Making lasagna is always an adventure, and George likes to give Fan a thrill now and again. And what better way to celebrate the first and a bit-th anniversary of their move to Hong Kong, not to mention George’s debut, than an adventure?

Olive oil in pan, crushed garlic, oregano, secret spice, a handful of mint and rosemary from the plants on the balcony that, unlike most of his horticulture, haven’t yet died. One medium onion, a lively one, George reflects as he dabs away a tear. Chopped onion in the pan, low heat, soften it up while he butchers tomatoes, enjoying the tomatonian blood on the chopping board; add meat and simmer. Lasagna: two eggs, flour, some olive oil, and knead until it no longer sticks to his hands.

He steps back from a scattering of vegetable carcasses and a halo of flour around the mixing bowl and sees an hour has passed. Cooking is nothing if not absorbing, and he needed a distraction from the seventy-five minute soliloquy spinning around in his head. He leaves the dough to do whatever it does and wanders into the combined living and dining room of their four-hundred square foot apartment. The computer regards him with a baleful stare. He ignores it and phones her.

She doesn’t pick up. She’s probably in a meeting. Fan spends most of her life in meetings.

He succumbs to the computer. George was born a century late. Quill pens and leather-bound ledgers are more his style. Alone amongst his peers, he learns his lines from a printout rather than memorising them from the screen of an Indriod, A-phone, or whatever. Nonetheless, he has, over the years, come to appreciate the virtual world, and especially the Blog of Nemesis.

It is a subversive blog. Not a call to arms, but nevertheless a critical eye on the random flailing of the disintegrating polity that Hong Kong has become. George doubts that things were any better under the British who, in his view, got away with it because they were white rather than because they were good, or even competent. Nonetheless, since the CEO of Hong Kong was replaced with a mayor by executive fiat from Beijing, the gentle decline has become more of a rapid tumble.

Whither art thou? he asks the computer on seeing that the blog’s author has not yet posted. And thou, sweet shrew? he asks as Fan’s phone once more rings out. In this age of Whatscrap, Fakebook and the like, an SMS is the equivalent of a quill pen. He types one into his unsmart phone, and hopes Fan will read it.

Back into the thick of things. He rolls the pasta flat, cuts it into sheets, makes the béchamel sauce and assembles the lasagna. The oven is the flat’s only concession to things Western: he sets it on 220 and puts the dish in.

Chef, thespian, luddite. As the lasagna cooks, he repeats his lines out loud. When the dish comes out at the end of his seventy-five minute soliloquy, he attempts once more to make contact with Fan. Still, no one picks up, and she has not responded to his message. The lasagna cools. The computer doubles up as television and integrated home entertainment console: George checks the local channel, but switches off in disgust on seeing the face of Hong Kong’s mayor.

Delay no more (his favourite Canto-pun). He eats a quarter of the lasagna, which has turned out to be one of his better ones, with a shout of spice and the cheese crisped without being burnt. He scribbles a note for Fan and props it up on the lasagna’s serving dish before taking the four flights of stairs down to the street.

The streets are quiet, as they have been since the suppression of the HK Independence Movement a few months ago, when all twenty-three of its leaders were rounded up and sentenced under some archaic colonial law which, in the best tradition of ex-colonies gone basket-case loony, had been dredged up, but with the nice local twist of being ‘reinterpreted’ by Beijing. Even so, the quiet tonight is almost preternatural. As if Lady Macbeth had just found the spot on her hand.

One of the reasons that George and Fan live in a tiny apartment, probably an illegal structure, on the roof of a crumbling village house in the arse end of the New Territories is that he is a stage actor, a career that pays even less than television, which makes it a pittance indeed. Add to that the fact that George is an English-language stage actor, with a total potential audience of less than one per cent of Hong Kong’s rapidly migrating seven million people, and compound that with being ethnically Chinese and speaking both Cantonese and English with a Liverpudlian accent, and it’s a wonder he gets any parts at all. But the immediacy of the footlights is inimitable. Nothing comes close. With cameras, there is always a second chance; with the stage, one fuck up and you’re dead.

In what used to be the McAuley and is now the Zhou Enlai Studio of the Arts Centre, George faces an audience of fifty-two. Two-thirds of capacity, which, for the debut performance of experimental theatre written, directed and acted by George Kwok Chi-man, is pretty good. He had hoped that Fan, as executive producer, would make it fifty-three but, as the lights dim and the audience wrestle their phones into silence, there’s still no sign of her.

Seventy-eight minutes later – an overrun of three minutes – and George is chuffed. The audience laughed where they were supposed to, oohed and aahed on cue, and nobody’s phone went off. For all the government’s nasty words, subversive theatre is not dead yet.

And, when he gets home, the lasagna’s still uneaten.

‘Fuck,’ he says.

It’s nudging midnight, and Fan hasn’t returned his call or messages. His phone is a dumb phone so checking the e-mail means switching on the computer.

No e-mail from Fan. ‘Double fuck’. As executive producer and thus bank-roller of his play, he’d hoped she would at the very least make time to accompany its director, writer and sole performer for a celebratory drink after its opening night. No such luck. He checks his watch: he can still make it to the pub before closing time.

‘The usual?’ asks Ah-Ping. ‘Dim ah?’

`Quiet tonight,’ says George as he looks around the all-but-deserted bar.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ says Ah-Ping. ‘The twenty-three are going to be executed. There are a million people in Victoria Park.’

Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence Osborne and In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner are both, as it happens, set in Cambodia. And there the similarity ends – but there are plenty of reviews that will explain why. What prompted this post was the points of view from which they were written, and how I think they could both have been a little better with a little more attention on this point.

Vaddey’s book, as the Author’s Notes state, is based on her own experience growing up during the Khmer Rouge era. The author was five years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power, and escaped when the regime collapsed four years later. Her protagonist was two years older.

The book is written from the first person – “I.” However, it’s pretty obvious from the first few pages that the “I” writing the book is not a seven year old, but an adult remembering the time when she was seven. In other words, and unlike Peter Cary’s True History of the Kelly Gang in which he writes as a barely literate uneducated immigrant would, Vaddey writes using the voice of what she is: a literate adult.

The result, to my mind, detracted from the work. The “I” became a distraction, a give-away that “I” was going to survive the genocide, a device that lost its purpose very early in the work. Using a third person would have left open the possibility that the protagonist wouldn’t make it, increasing the tension.

This was needed. Despite some very moving writing, the emotional heart of the book is the relationship between the main character and her father, who is disappeared about a third of the way through the book. By half way through, it is obvious that her father won’t come back and, with the use of “I” closing off the possibilty that the main character wouldn’t survive, the dramatic tension of the book weakened.

Lawrence’s book was a take on today’s Cambodia, and almost self-consciously avoids “atrocity tourism.” The problem I found with this book was that the many points of view made the author lazy.

The book starts with an undistinguished backpacker crossing the land border into Cambodia. The first ten or so chapters are told from his point of view: we see the world through his eyes.

Chapter 11 is therefore a shock because, a quarter of the way through the book, there is an abrupt change and we see the world through another character’s eyes. It was a few pages before I picked up on this, and I had to go back and re-read it to make sense of what was going on.

From this point, the discipline collapsed. Forget about one character’s point of view per chapter – there was one sequence where we got three character’s points of view in as many pages. While it would be exaggerating to say that these changes came thick and fast, trying to work out which pair of eyes I was seeing things through was a distraction.

It also took the onus off the main character, who ought to have been baffled at events around him. But because I, the reader, knew so much that he didn’t, the sheer terror that someone in that situation would find themselves in didn’t come across.

Of course, one of the reasons I have started writing this blog is to remind myself of what I liked and I didn’t. And there’s a whole stack of classics from the 18th and 19th centuries which have a narrator to guide us along. But I guess my point to me is to choose the rules and stick with them.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra is a great book, and deserves all the praise that’s been heaped on it. You can find reviews of it all over the place. What I want to add is a little different.

In the author’s notes, Anthony says that he re-typed his book four times to get to the final manuscript. I was gob-smacked. I hate typing. I’m crap, I wear out backspace keys faster than an F1 driver goes through tyres, and even after getting rid of all those wiggly red underlines, I find I’ve used the wrong words (where / were / wear) all over the place.

But, I’d been stalled on one of my own books for some time. I knew it wasn’t quite there, but continual editing and re-editing seemed to be getting me further away from where I wanted to be, rather than closer to it. As an old mentor of mine once said, writing can get like over-worked pastry, crumbly and grey, and that’s what was happening to this book.

So, I followed Anthony’s idea. I printed my book out, sat down, and re-typed it. I don’t mean I went through it with a pen crossing out some bits, re-working others and typing in the changes. I’d been doing that for ages – too long – and was getting nowhere. I mean I put the stack of paper next to my computer and typed the whole lot in again from scratch.

I was cynical when I began. I tend to write my first drafts long-hand – yes, pen and paper – and type them in, and that first typing in is part of the process of improving writing. I’d already done that, and I’d crossed out and moved bits around and all the other stuff writers do to try and wrestle these awkward entities, words, into submission. I doubted I would gain much. However, this book has about 70 chapters of a about thousand each, so there didn’t seem to be much to lose by trying it out on the first one or two.

Day 1: Re-typed the first two chapters. What a grind. Fuck.

Day 2: Read what I’d typed on Day 1. Boy. I didn’t know what I’d done, but even if it was still crap, it was a much better grade of crap.

So, I set myself a target of 4,000 words and went for it. And that was me, for just under twenty days. By the end of it, I felt as though something very heavy had driven over me and reversed a couple of times. I was barely articulate. I’d broken my laptop keyboard. But it was worth it. The book had gained a stylistic uniformity that took me by surprise. It had fewer loose ends, fewer asides that went nowhere, and just read better.

Perhaps because I hate typing so much, the process of re-typing did what the editing couldn’t: forced me to think if I really needed to say a thing, or whether I could say the same thing with fewer words. One thing that took me quite by surprise was that my book came down from 73,000 to 67,000 words. I didn’t think that was possible.

So, writers, if you’re at a dead end with the polish that shines, I recommend re-typing. It kept me sober for almost three weeks, too. But that benefit turned out to be rather more transient…